Clockworkorange essay

Be or not to be like a clockwork orange

“It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

The important thing is the moral choice”

Anthony Burgess.

This story shows the case of a boy, who lives a wild transition between the badness and the kindness. Anthony Burgess gives us a very functional tool to understand some typical characteristics inherent to human nature, andhe tries to highlight that any person, in this case Alex, must decide by himself what to do, be good o be bad; as he said on the introduction: “Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities”[1]. So the main idea here is not support the kind of behavior of Alex and his friends or “droogs” like he called them, but the idea is to stand between his good and evil side, try tounderstand how someone could achieve a radical change on life, following a inverse process: knowing the evil side first to realize that the good side is better, but always changing by own will, using the free will.

With regard to the title of the book, it could be understood not only in the way the author explains that: “I mean it to stand for the application of a mechanistic morality to a livingorganism oozing with juice and sweetness”[2], therefore another way to understand it, is taking the role of the protagonist, and maybe feel that he is immature, so he is not ready to fall down from the tree; The meaning of this is focused on explain that the maturity of a fruit, in this case of a man, must be influenced by his own wishes, and not by a mechanism (psychological, religious, politic,economic, etc.).

Maybe to go beyond of the superfluous context of the story, where is only shown the violence, crime, and destruction of the human beings, we should take off some moral prejudices, to be raised to the bench, in an objective way, of the real situation, because for everybody is easy judge and condemn the bad facts, but sometimes is important to see the other side of the circumstance.Why not consider that there is another possibility: In the modern societies there are a lot of underlying stereotypes, which could influence the conducts of young people. So that the cruelty appears as a choice to have fun and it represents a valid option to hide worries and issues that prevail on family and education, following the legacy of the current social environment: hyperindividualism,selfish and the fight between strong and weak people.

The story starts on the Korova milkbar, a place where Alex and his “droogs” hanged out. They drunk a special kind of drink mixed with some psychoactive substances and then they go out to the streets to do some mischief like stealing people, fighting with other gangs or looking for women. They attacked people who did not have thesame philosophy of their life, as Alex said when they found an old man on the street: “There was nothing I hated more than to see a filthy old drunkie, a-howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between as if it were a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts. I could never stand to see anyone like that, especially when they were old like this one was”[3].

All these kindof things happen on the daily life of the “droogs”, every night the look for something special to do, until one day that, after a fight between them, they go to a woman´s house and Alex murdered her “accidentally” as he said. Because of the previous fight, Georgie, Dim and Pete left him alone and when the police arrive to the crime scene, Alex is arrested.

Since then Alex´s life becomes anenvelope paradox, where he goes to prison and starts to realize the real sense of his life. At first it was too hard for him, but as time passes, he gets used to living that punishment and even he approaches to the prison chaplain, who begins to worry about him and his behavior. Someday Alex talk to him trying to explain his great improvement and searching for an explanation of a new rehab method,...